


Sword of the Realm

by devilinthedetails



Category: PIERCE Tamora - Works, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Death, Decay, Empire, Gen, Last Promises, Promises, Strength, Weakness, death bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:28:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27284938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilinthedetails/pseuds/devilinthedetails
Summary: Gareth swears to a dying King Jasson to be Roald's sword and strength.
Kudos: 6





	Sword of the Realm

**Author's Note:**

> In my head canon, Jasson remains king until his death, because I just picture him as too strong, too controlling, and generally too overbearing a personality to abdicate and allow someone else to rule while there was still life in his body. So I write this story from that point of view.

Sword of the Realm

Gareth sat waiting at his desk, staring out the window of his study at a gray autumn landscape. Fog hung thick as a funeral shroud over the Olorun and wind howled against the palace walls like wolves in the forest on the night of a full moon, raising the hairs on the nape of Gareth’s neck. Pelting rain dashed against the glass windows, and a chill dampness seeped between the panes, invading Gareth’s bones with a pervading promise of imminent doom and despair. 

Everyone in the palace from the highest ranking courtier to the lowest scullion was waiting in gloom for one king to die and another to take his place though nobody dared to voice the thought allowed for fear of offending a great king who had always been mercurial and prone to sudden, violent rages. They were all waiting uneasily on the cusp of change, the lung rot that was making the once strong king waste away reflected in the decaying leaves falling from the trees and blanketing the ground. 

Autumn was a time for death and decay, Gareth mused only to have the thought interrupted by his manservant Timon appearing at his elbow with a bow. 

“A messenger arrived with a letter from the king, Your Grace.” Timon extended a sealed envelope to Gareth, and Gareth tried not to flinch at this title that was still new to him. This title that meant his father was dead, and he was the Duke of Naxen now. This title that he must learn to carry with dignity as befitted one of his blood and heritage. 

Out of habit rather than any real suspicion of tampering, Gareth glanced at the seal to confirm that it was the king’s and unbroken. Then he slit open the letter and read that it was a summons to King Jasson’s sick bed, which all knew to truly be his death bed. 

He was to present himself to the king at once. The dying king would have no patience with delays. 

Gareth rose and hurried through the corridors to the king’s chambers. The guards posted outside the king’s quarters must have been alerted to expect him for they moved their weapons away from the door they had been barring as Gareth approached and saluted him as he passed into a chamber thick with the smell of decay and the incense priests only burned when praying for the dying or the dead. 

Roald sat as if carved from stone in a mahogany chair to the king’s left, and the indomitable, forever unflinching Queen Daneline perched with perfect poise on the king’s right, the tightness with which she clasped her husband’s massive paw of a hand the only betrayal of her distress. She had in her own way loved her mercurial husband despite the arguments and the shouting that often echoed from the royal quarters along the palace corridors. 

The king’s bulk lay buried and obscured under a mountain of fur blankets made from animals Jasson had hunted for himself in the royal forest. 

His fat fingers were too bloated now to bear any royal ring, Gareth noticed as King Jasson flapped an irritable palm, banishing his wife and child curtly as if they were pesky flies to be swatted from a picnic. “Leave us. I wish to talk with Gareth alone.” 

Queen Daneline withdrew her hand from her husband’s, and Roald rose with a fleeting look that seemed to wish Gareth good luck with this irascible, dying man who still controlled the realm by the sheer force of his will. 

Once the queen and the Crown Prince had disappeared from the room, King Jasson turned eyes that remained sharp despite the shadow of death looming over him on Gareth. “Soon I will be dead, and my son will be king after me.” 

“The entire kingdom prays for your recovery, sire.” Gareth inclined his head. No need to mention that the prayers were unlikely to be answered and that the Black God would surely soon claim King Jasson for his own. 

King Jasson’s snort indicated that he understood very well what Gareth had left unsaid. 

Contemptuously, King Jasson rasped in a hollow imitation of the tone that once could have been heard thundering across battlefields, “You’ve turned into a cautious, cringing courtier, Gareth, but that’s not what the realm needs you to be. It needs you to be its sword and its strength always. My son will appoint you to be his champion when I am gone.” 

“It would be a great honor if he did.” Gareth spoke softly, bowing his head again. 

“Not an honor but a burden.” King Jasson made an impatient noise in the clogged, rotting depths of his throat. Speech was a challenge for him in his illness but he valiantly insisted on making himself heard anyway. “It is a burden, not an honor, to be the sword and strength of a weak man, and my son, despite my best efforts to raise him otherwise, has grown into a weak man. He is not strong like you. Like a woman, he cannot abide fighting, shies away from bloodshed, and refuses to keep his sword sharp. Under him, this country will be vulnerable to attack, so it will fall to you—to your vigilance and your sword—to protect this realm.” 

“I will always do my duty to protect and serve the realm, Your Majesty.” Gareth bit back a defense of Roald, who was his friend and brother-in-law. Roald wasn’t weak. He was just strong in a different way than King Jasson, a way King Jasson could never understand or accept, but it would do no good to argue with a stubborn man on his deathbed. King Jasson would go to his grave certain that his heir was weak, and there was nothing Gareth could do to change his mind. 

“I have tried to build an empire, a powerful Tortall worthy of respect on the world stage, for my son to inherit, but empire’s collapse without a strong man to hold them together and rule over them.” King Jasson clutched his fur blankets as if they were the empire he was desperately trying to cling to as he faded from this life. “My son cannot be that strong man, Gareth. So you must be it for him. My son is weak as a woman, so you must be his sword and strength.” 

Gareth was too shocked by this to know how to reply. 

“Swear to me that you’ll be my son’s sword and strength.” King Jasson fixed a commanding glare at Gareth. 

“I swear to be your son’s sword and strength.” Gareth fell to his knees as he offered this vow of fealty through numb lips. “I will serve and protect him until my last breath, sire.” 

“May your loyalty be sharp as your sword.” King Jasson’s hand rested in Gareth’s brown hair as a benediction and a burden. “And may you ever keep your sword sharp in service and protection of the realm and my son.” 

That was the last promise Gareth ever made to King Jasson. A day later, the great king who had conquered Barzun and large swaths of Tusaine and Galla for Tortall fell into the final, unbreakable silence of death. The realm stopped waiting and began mourning the loss of their conqueror.


End file.
